After a brief hiatus, progress is moving forward at full speed with the CyberMULE. A number of improvements have been implemented by Tim Anglin (postdoc), who is now working full time on this project.

Here's a panoramic view of the instrument:

This is a closer view of the filtering and delay line portion. The original plan had reflective filters on the automated filter wheels, but the rotation of these things was not perfect enough -- the beam walked when you switched filters. We moved to a mostly transmissive filtering system to avoid this, but we also included automated fine pointing after all filtering in order to make all frequency ranges come out on the same path.

Sample holders have been programmed and labeled on the computer controlled stage:

Here you can see a better view of the filtering part of the instrument. This was trickier than expected and we had several iterations. One challenge here was that the output beams from the OPAs are not separated in any way -- signal, idler, and sometimes SHG or DFG come out the same place -- and the filter set from Quantronix is a manual system... you have to bolt on a clunky filter block to switch beams. Tim came up with a fairly extensive series of filters in the automated filter wheels that allow you to select for specific frequencies. Signal and idler separation can be really tricky sometimes!

Just a few quick update photos of the MULE starting to take its form. The laser lab temp is finally under control, and J. Brom and his undergrads, Nick and Jimmy, will be assembling portions of the pump-probe setup this week.
Here you can see a few of the components being laid out to estimate the beam paths.